New Delhi: Seasoned fraudsters and conmen masquerading as judges and judicial staff, weaponising technology to exert backdoor influence and build parallel judiciaries by fraud—a look at how conmen hijack the names of the highest constitutional authorities to threaten and manipulate the very officers tasked with upholding the law.
Impersonating sitting high court judges, Supreme Court judges, judges’ secretaries and even operating a fake tribunal—from Delhi to Gujarat to Haryana—these cases could write their own Netflix plots.
But for all the audacity of judicial impersonation, the consequences have often been decidedly less dramatic. Some trials have ended in conviction, some remain stuck in years of litigation, and in at least one case, a man accused of impersonating a sitting judge remained free despite repeated courts refusing to protect him from arrest, awaiting the police’s role to kick in.
In a judgment delivered on 20 August 2026, the Chief Judicial Magistrate at Delhi’s Tis Hazari Courts, Harshita Mishra, convicted the notorious conman Sukesh Chandrashekhar for what was described as an act of “institutional sacrilege”.
“There are cases which test the law. There are cases which test the evidence. And then there are cases which test the limits of human audacity and mendacity,” the 121-page judgment convicting Chandrashekhar of impersonating a sitting Supreme Court judge said.
The prosecution established that on 28 April 2017, while in the custody of the Delhi Police Crime Branch for a major corruption scam, Chandrashekhar orchestrated a dramatic deception. Slipping past security, he gained access to the smartphone of his custody officer, Constable Manjeet. Using this phone, he made a series of “clandestine” calls to the landline and personal mobile number of Ms. Poonam Chaudhary, the Special Judge who was actively hearing his bail application.
Chandrashekhar did not present himself as an ordinary citizen; instead, “he borrowed the highest judicial authority in the land… to create an aura of unquestionable command”. Posing first as the Personal Secretary (PS) to a sitting Supreme Court Judge from Kerala (Justice “KJ”), and then altering his voice and accent to impersonate the Judge himself, Chandrashekhar called the Special Judge and directed her to immediately release “accused Sukesh” on bail.
When the Special Judge hesitated, the caller did not negotiate; he threatened her with “serious professional repercussions” if she failed to comply, asserting that he had read the FIR and found no substance in the charges.
The judgment records the chilling systemic threat of this act: “He played his final, most absurd card—and in doing so, he ensured that the very system he sought to mock would respond not with panic, but with the unyielding, methodical weight of penal law.”
“If such conduct of conmen such as Sukesh were to succeed, every pending proceeding could potentially become vulnerable to an invisible parallel judicial system—one operating not in courtrooms, but through telephones; not through judgments, but through instructions; not through evidence, but through impersonation. That would be an extraordinary proposition indeed: The creation of a parallel judiciary by fraud,” judge Mishra said.
Judge Poonam Chaudhary who was hearing Sukesh’s bail application at the time, acted with swiftness and a “heightened sense of institutional responsibility”, immediately verifying the call with the Supreme Court registry. Learning that no such PS named ‘Hanumant Prasad’ existed and that the call was a hoax, she lodged an institutional complaint the following day, setting the law in motion.
Nine years later, Chandrashekhar has been convicted under the Indian Penal Code (IPC) for falsely personating a public servant, threatening a public servant, and criminal intimidation via anonymous communication. His sentencing is scheduled for later this week.
Aside from calling Special Judge Poonam Chaudhary pretending to be a Supreme Court judge, Chandrashekhar had also impersonated the personal secretary to then Cabinet Minister for Law & Justice, Ravi Shankar Prasad, to demand special favours and luxuries in Tihar Jail.
Curious case of Manoj Kumar Jha
On 6 August 2026, Justice Girish Kathpalia of the Delhi High Court rejected a third anticipatory bail application filed by a habitual offender Manoj Kumar Jha.
Unlike usual fraudsters, Manoj Kumar Jha’s operations were designed to infiltrate the state’s administrative and judicial machinery. According to the FIR registered in 2024 at the Parliament Street Police Station, Jha’s modus operandi was to impersonate high-level civil servants to gain access to the highest echelons of power. Jha contacted top-ranking government authorities by posing as an IAS officer and, in other instances, as a sitting judge of the Patna High Court.
He used these fabricated high-status identities to breach security clearances and request confidential administrative data by contacting administrative individuals and manipulating senior authorities to illicitly extract confidential government information via documents.
In a parallel Gurugram FIR registered in 2018, Jha is accused of crossing the boundary from administrative to judicial impersonation by posing as B. K. Jha, a judge of the Patna High Court.
Jha had filed repeated anticipatory bail applications, all of which were dismissed by the High Court in 2024 and 2025. On September 8, 2025, the Supreme Court of India dismissed his petition, leaving zero legal barriers to his arrest.
Yet, for nearly a year, Jha remained entirely untouched by the Delhi Police. His legal counsel argued in court that because the police had failed to arrest him for an entire year, his custody was clearly “not required”.
The high court had strongly established a link between Jha’s impunity and active facilitation from within the police force. Justice Kathpalia was “surprised” at the police’s total lack of effort, stating it “conveys an impression that accused/applicant is being helped and there is something more than meets the eye”.
Jha’s criminal record, according to the HC order, spans at least 12 active FIRs across Delhi, Haryana, Punjab, Bihar, and Chandigarh. In one case being probed by the CBI, Jha was arrested for posing as the Chairman of the National Highway Authority of India (NHAI), cheating a victim out of Rs 80 lakh, and utilising over 200 illegal SIM cards to coordinate his operations.
Gujarat’s fake arbitration tribunal scam
In October 2024, Gujarat Police arrested 37-year-old Morris Samuel Christian in Ahmedabad for running a fake arbitration tribunal. He was charged with forgery, criminal conspiracy and impersonation. For more than 5 years, he had pretended to be a court-appointed judge, operating a fake courtroom in Gandhinagar with hired staff and lawyers to deceive victims—primarily over high-value land disputes.
Before that, in September 2011, Christian, a Gandhinagar resident, was booked for wearing a black lawyer’s coat and neckband to appear in an Ahmedabad family court without a valid licence.
In March 2026, an Ahmedabad court acquitted him of this specific 2011 cheating charge—ruling that the prosecution failed to prove beyond reasonable doubt that he had actively practised as a lawyer on that specific day, giving him the benefit of doubt.
Dhani Ram Mittal’s case on Netflix series
The 1969 Jhajjar courtroom infiltration was so inherently audacious—it made its way to the legal comedy series ‘Maamla Legal Hai’ on Netflix.
As many as 2,000 jail inmates were unlawfully bailed out by a clerk-posing as judge Dhani Ram Mittal in Haryana’s Jhajjar. When state authorities realised a conman had been running a sessions court for nearly 40 days, the police initiated a probe with charges of cheating, impersonation, and forgery. However, the initial trial stalled because the principal evidence—the very files of the criminals Mittal had illegally acquitted—had vanished with him.
When Mittal was later apprehended, the legal proceedings transformed into a decades-long game of cat-and-mouse as Mittal acted as his own defence counsel, using procedural technicalities to repeatedly defeat the prosecution’s arguments against him. He routinely challenged the authenticity of the handwriting on his fake appointment letters, tied up the court in endless cross-examinations, and intentionally dragged out the trial for years. By the time the state could piece together an airtight case, Mittal had already secured bail and resumed his prolific lifestyle of stealing cars from the parking lots of the very courts trying him.
He passed away from a cardiac arrest in April 2024 at the age of 85, with nearly 25 criminal cases pending against him, which had to be closed on account of his death.
Arriving in a police station as a Delhi HC judge
In December 2022, the Delhi Police arrested Narender Kumar Aggarwal after he messaged the Samaypur Badli ACP pretending to be a sitting Delhi High Court judge, demanding Rs 5 lakh.
Aggarwal, more than 60 years old then, later arrived at the Samaypur Badli police station in a Tata Nano, meeting the SHO and demanding Rs 5 lakh to set aside a writ petition against the SHO.
When the police finally identified him as a resident of Delhi’s Adarsh Nagar, his messages revealed that this wasn’t the first time he had attempted to impersonate a sitting high court judge.
His trial, ongoing currently in the Rohini court, is at the first stage of framing of charges.
Digital impersonation cases
In August 2024, the Supreme Court of India filed a cyber crime complaint with the Delhi Police against a social media handle that claimed to be of the then Chief Justice of India D. Y. Chandrachud, asking money for a cab.
This was done after a screenshot went viral on social media, where the scammer, who used the CJI’s name and his image, sought Rs 500 from an X user, identified as Kailash Meghwal, to get a cab to attend a Collegium meeting. The scammer also promised Meghwal he would return the money once he reached the Supreme Court.
In December 2025, cyber police arrested a major operative from Surat in Gujarat, who ran an elaborate “digital arrest” racket. In this multi-crore fraud case, criminals went as far as staging fake online court hearings where a fraudster directly impersonated ex-CJI Chandrachud to dupe a victim out of Rs 3.71 crore.
(Edited by Viny Mishra)
Also read: Sonu Nigam vs Sonu Nigam: How singer invoked personality rights to win impersonation case